6 Simple Ways To Improve Your Mobile Marketing Awesomesauce (Social Media Today) Mobile use is happening in a big way. The problem is many don't feel like there is a lot that can be done about addressing it for marketing. There are, however, a few simple things that to increase your mobile presence in a big way:

Go where the search is

Optimize that inbox

Research is the name of the game

Do a location refresher

Add product information and images to your website

Remember, you already have a mobile website

Mobile traffic on smartphones is up 103%. And there is no reason to believe that it will slow down any time soon.

Travel Apps Dominate Mobile Travel Websites This Summer (Nielsen) As the summer travel season comes to a close, Nielsen looked at the usage of travel-related mobile apps and websites during June 2012. Findings showed that U.S. Android and iOS users spent 95% of their time accessing travel information from travel apps, versus only 5% from the mobile Web. This discrepancy was largely driven by Google Maps (the top travel category app and mobile website during June) which accounted for 78% of all mobile time spent on travel. "The variation in time spent across the different travel categories shows that there's significant room for app development and growth," said Nichole Henderson, a senior research executive at Nielsen.

How Mobile Startups Can Iterate Better, Faster, Quicker (Andrew Chen) Mobile startups are taking too long to ship their initial versions and then spending too much time between updates. As a result, they fail in a way that's reminiscent of 1999 "waterfall"-style product development practices. To improve the iteration cycle, here are some ideas and suggestions:

Pick the right (minimum) product

Test the market before launch

Code and ship quickly

Combine that with ample mobile startup funding, and the strong teams we have in tech, and you should be in business.

Developing Minds Want To Know: Q&A With Lori Roth (Appolicious) Lori Roth, Director of Mobile Products for WhitePages, sees most of the innovations in apps coming from location-based services with the two biggest limitations being the closed functionality of iOS and Android fragmentation. She has three areas of advice for mobile app developers:

Think broad, beyond a single app on a single platform

Think distribution, with SEO in mind

Think money, with an upfront monetization strategy

And hang on for the wild ride ahead.

How To Make Your Site Faster For Mobile Users (Speed Awareness Month) A majority of smartphone users expect sites to load in 4 seconds or less. That's a wake-up call for any site owner who may have lapsed into a bit of complacency. Three main strategies for improving performance are to:

Reduce the number of HTTP requests required to fetch the resources for each page

Apple's Huge Opportunity In Paid Mobile App Search (BI Intelligence) Apple is on its way to 25 billion apps downloaded in 2012. With that growth, however, has come issues. There are now more than 650,000 apps in the App Store. Navigating that unwieldy maze has emerged as a major issue for developers and consumers alike. Here's why paid search could work for the App Store:

The "Top 25" App Store list is not the holy grail and is difficult

Better app discovery would clearly benefit both developers and consumers

It's Going To Be A Busy Fall For Microsoft On The Mobile Front (ZDNet)Microsoft watchers already knew October was going to be a crazy month, given Windows 8's general availability date is October 26. But here are some dates and tentative locations for a number of Microsoft's upcoming launches. Windows Phone 8's build-up to launch started yesterday with Samsung showing off what's officially the first Windows Phone 8 device (but offering no pricing or availability details). September 5th Nokia is expected to show off some of its planned Windows Phone 8 devices, with AT&T rumored to be the lead carrier for them. And HTC is expected to be next out of the gate with Windows Phone 8 handsets around mid-September. But October, specifically late October, is when things really ramp up.